Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles examining efforts by Tim Leiweke and Ed Roski Jr. to attract a National Football League team to Southern California. Leiweke proposes to build a stadium in Los Angeles; Roski in Industry.

LOS ANGELES – Anschutz Entertainment Group President and CEO Tim Leiweke says building an NFL stadium adjacent to Staples Center would drive entertainment-hungry Southland residents to the downtown L.A. Live campus.

Farmers Field, as the stadium would be named, would create a one-stop destination for sporting events, concerts and conventions by adding to the draw of Staples Center, the Los Angeles Convention Center and the Nokia Theater, Leiweke said.

But before he can bring his dream to fruition, Leiweke faces some significant infrastructure issues. Among them are a scarcity of parking, outdated roadways and meager mass transit options.

Billionaire developer Ed Roski Jr. has a competing plan to build an $800 million NFL stadium at the interchange of the 57 and 60 freeways in Industry, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Roski’s plan has been in the works for nearly three years. During that time, Industry voters passed a measure that allocated $160 million for roadway and other infrastructure improvements around the stadium’s proposed site off of Grand Avenue.

Roski’s plan also calls for the construction of 25,000 parking spaces on the vacant hills surrounding the stadium site. Roski’s site is 600 acres; Leiweke’s is 15.

The chosen parcel for Leiweke’s proposed stadium is now home to the West Hall of the Los Angeles Convention Center, as well as two parking lots that are used for Lakers and Kings games.

Leiweke expects the city of Los Angeles to issue $350 million in publicly backed bonds to replace the West Hall and the parking lots that would be demolished for his stadium. He does not expect to spend money on roadway improvements.

Traffic impact

AEG and L.A. city officials have yet to start work on a state mandated Environmental Impact Report, which will study the traffic congestion a stadium would cause, city officials said.

State law also requires that Leiweke and city officials mitigate any traffic problems or impacts the report finds, by improving roadways.

Leiweke said he believes the existing roads and freeways will suffice because they were designed to bring 300,000 people in and out of downtown every day.

He has not budgeted for roadway improvements in the $1.35 billion he estimates it will cost to build the his state-of-the-art, multi-use stadium and replace the West Hall.

“Certainly there is going to have to be traffic mitigations,” L.A. Chief Legislative Analyst Gerry Miller said.

And Leiweke will have to pay for them, Miller said.

“There will have to be an EIR. That EIR is going to require mitigations and those mitigations would be the responsibility of the developer,” Miller said.

In an effort to bolster his contention that the existing roads and freeways are sufficient, Leiweke told city officials he conducted an “exhaustive” traffic study of the downtown area.

His study consisted of observing area roadways on two consecutive Sunday mornings, Leiweke said.

“They could have land(ed) a helicopter on the freeway,” Leiweke said at a Jan. 19 City Council committee meeting. “There is no traffic in downtown Los Angeles at 10 or 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning.”

Councilman Tom LaBonge disagreed, telling Leiweke the freeway that runs closest to the stadium and other nearby highways are antiquated.

“On the issue of the freeway, Tim, more needs to be done. The 110 and the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways are 1965-design and (there are) choke points there.”

LaBonge, who supports Leiweke’s stadium plan, also said a study should be conducted to examine an expansion of the 110 Freeway.

In response to LaBonge, Leiweke said that AEG is not Caltrans and his focus is ensuring the current roads and freeways will suffice.

“We understand there’s congestion, we agree with you 100 percent, (but) we’re not Caltrans; so we can’t solve that,” Leiweke said. “What I can assure you of is that, as it relates to getting people in and out of the stadium on a Sunday afternoon, or one time a year during a weeknight, we are very focused at making sure that the current infrastructure will work … so for example, we won’t book Staples Center on the day of a football game.”

The EIR also requires city officials and AEG to work out who pays for roadway improvements, officials said.

And neither Leiweke nor city officials seem willing to foot the bill.

“I’m very nervous that we’re not taking into account infrastructure costs that wind up being ancillary to some of these changes,” City Councilman Paul Koretz said. “We take one wrong step and we could push the city into bankruptcy.”

By leaving out the cost of roadway improvements and other infrastructure costs, the amount of public funding spent on stadiums is frequently underestimated, according to industry experts and academics in the sports economics field.

“… the real cost of public funding has been underestimated due to the routine omission of land cost write-downs, infrastructure grants, and lease give-backs, often obscured by complex development and leasing agreements,” according to a 2005 research paper authored by Harvard Professor Judith Grant Long for Rutgers University.

Grant Long was part of a panel of experts who testified in front of a 2007 Congressional subcommittee hearing on public financing for stadiums.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, chaired the subcommittee hearing. He argued that public funding for stadiums diverts money from critical infrastructure.

“State and local officials continue to invest public funds in professional sports stadiums in spite of the persistence of crumbling bridges, roads and schools,” Kucinich said at the hearing.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area ranks tops in the nation for traffic congestion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Commuters in the L.A. area spend an average of 72 hours a year stuck in traffic – 12 more than the next most congested metropolitan areas, Washington D.C. and San Francisco, according to the report card.

Parking issues

Leiweke said he will build 4,000 parking spaces to replace the 2,600 that need to be demolished to make room for the stadium.

That adds 1,400 spaces for the 64,000- to 72,000-seat stadium. He did not specify where the new parking spaces would be located in the densely developed area.

According to Leiweke, the replacement parking spots will be paid for with $80 million of the $350 million in bonds the city has yet to approve.

Leiweke has not budgeted to build any additional parking, but he said there are 32,000 parking spots within a “15-minute walk” of where the stadium would be built.

Those parking spots are primarily located in small lots and garages that are owned by businesses in the surrounding area, according to Leiweke.

In Santa Clara, a major problem developers of the 49ers’ planned new stadium faced in drafting an EIR was proving they had enough parking, said Ron Garratt, the city’s retired assistant city manager who continues to work as a consultant.

Surrounding businesses have plenty of parking, but getting someone to sign a contract years in advance proved a challenge, Garratt said.

“We needed 21,000 parking spaces in what is a business park area on game day,” Garratt said. “We could not fully prove we had all those spaces. You cannot get contracts (for parking spaces from neighboring businesses) five or six years out.”

A lack of parking at the 49ers’ current home, Candlestick Park, was one of the driving forces behind the team’s decision to try to move out of San Francisco, Garratt said.

They needed “an incredibly large parking garage that would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

Garratt said access to mass transit at the stadium’s proposed site in Santa Clara significantly diminished the need for parking.

Two train lines stop at the stadium’s doorstep and connect to six rail lines that crisscross the region,running in every direction from 114 miles north in Sacramento to 26 miles south in San Jose.

In Los Angeles, rail transit has far less reach.

Two light rail lines can carry passengers from 13 miles northeast in Pasadena (and a few miles east through East L.A. into Monterey Park) and 17 miles south in Long Beach.

Plans are in the works to extend the eastern line, the Gold Line, to Montclair by some time in 2017, transit officials said. There are also plans to run a light rail train as far west as Santa Monica.

A Metrolink station near Roski’s proposed site can bring fans from 25 miles west in downtown Los Angeles, and about 30 miles east in downtown Riverside.